Crux Page 16
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My mother’s father was dying. Both of Abuelo Coco’s legs were amputated. He was in the hospital more often than at home. Reduced to a mere torso, he begged his daughter to let him die. But she refused. She purchased a hospital bed, monitor, IV, catheter and more to nurse him at home, where he could be more comfortable.
Meanwhile, her list of grievances grew: she complained about the B’s on my report cards, about my sister’s increasing delinquency, about my costly riding lessons, about the danger of my hobbies. Whenever I had a bad fall at the barn, resulting in a concussion or a limp, she threatened to stop paying for my lessons. Whenever I went bodyboarding, she told me I was going to drown. I started interrupting her monologues with high-pitched, maniacal giggles or singing at the top of my lungs, trying to shock her into silence. I no longer let my mother hug or kiss me. If she tried, I recoiled in disgust, feeling smothered. She wasn’t happy about this, and assaulted me with her hands. You came out of my body, she said, her eyes wild with rage. Do you understand what this means?
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Abuelo Coco stopped eating. Abuela Coco tried to feed him. He kept his lips sealed. Weeks went by, and it became clear he was going to die. Mom wanted him to feel loved in his last days. She asked us to kiss him good night. But the sight of his legless body made me want to bolt. When I tried calling to mind his positive attributes, I could think only of the rabbit-softness of his curly silver hair and the pleasant Old Spice scent that lingered in his wake. I knew he was a cherished human being—that my mother felt she owed almost everything to him. But in recent years, I had known only his disdain.
As he died, I declined to go near him. My mother’s eyes filled with tears. Abuelo is going to die tonight, she whispered. Please go say goodbye.
Her sadness was suffocating, pressing against me like a horse’s haunches. I couldn’t bear it. I forced myself to go downstairs, steeling myself against the sight of him. As always, Abuelo Coco seemed not to notice my presence. He radiated erasure. Buenas noches, Abuelito, I said.
The next evening, my mother entered my room again. Tonight is the night, Jean, she said, weeping. Please go tell him you love him.
I refused. For days I pretended he didn’t exist. His body clung to life despite his mind’s determination to depart. Michelle did not feel the repulsion I did. Every day, she entered his room. She rested her head on his stomach and held his hands in hers. This moved my mother to tears. My sister was troublesome, perhaps, but at essence she was good. I was the coldhearted enemy, the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
This time, he’s going to die, my mother cried one evening. Go say goodbye, I beg you.
I took a deep breath. You always say it’s his last night. I’ll go down today, but that’s it, Mom, I swear. I entered his room. His proximity to the afterlife felt contagious. His irises were glazed and pale. His mouth hung open. I was afraid to breathe the air in his room. Kiss him, my mother said sharply. Kiss him good night.
If his ears were working, I realized, he could hear her. My mother stomped her foot. Kiss him! Kiss your grandfather, dammit! You’re going to lose him forever, you egotist, you Schizophrenic! Something cracked inside me. I threw open the door of the house and walked outside, my vision blurred by tears. An intricate spider’s web stretched from the eaves of our McMansion to my mother’s BMW. It looked nightmarish and impossible. I walked on, aimless, digging my nails into my palms, making them bleed.
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The same day Abuelo Coco died, my mother called every relative in Puerto Rico to notify them. “Papi murió,” she said, over and over again, staring into the distance with blurry bloodred eyes, golden ringlets sticking to her wet face. I felt so sorry for my mother, so unbearably sorry, that my sympathy, in that instant, snapped. I felt I would die if I kept suffering for her. At his funeral, I fought an incessant urge to laugh. The urge became irrepressible, and I exited the church.
My mother had always prohibited me from cutting my hair, shaving my legs or plucking my eyebrows. I shaved my legs. I chopped my hair off. I bleached it blonde. I accompanied my sister to a screamo concert, drank beer, smoked a cigarette. I asked her for makeup advice. She taught me to apply thick liner to make my eyes look bigger. She plucked my furry eyebrows, giving them a perfect arch. Suddenly, I was pretty again. I knew I wasn’t the most beautiful this time, but I had power.
I met a boy named David, a Guatemalan-Mexican Crip gangster who boasted he had killed a Blood on orders, stomping his skull into the sidewalk. He was the first boy who ever told me I was beautiful, and I fell instantly. I loved his dark skin, his seductive lips, his danger. He was sensual, experienced. I gave myself to him to destroy.
When he took my virginity, he asked if we could have anal sex, too. I declined. He penetrated me anyway. I screamed in pain. He stopped after two thrusts. But the damage had been done. The next day, horseback riding was excruciating.
I felt like I was on top of the world.
I had discovered a secret: a person can live fully, explosively, become resonant with the Big Bang itself. All it took was surrendering empathy—for others, yes, but also for the self. Give up love and gain the utmost intensity of every other feeling: ecstasy, fearlessness, devastation. Now I felt I understood my father. The freedom of it was intoxicating.
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David dumped me, then begged me to take him back. He did this repeatedly before he decided he didn’t want me at all. I drove to David’s house. I fell to my knees, clutched his blue Chargers jersey and declared I would die without him.
Damn, girl, he said. Chill. Let’s talk, aight? Smoke some weed. I followed him into his room. He sat on the edge of his bed and rolled a joint. I threw myself on him. He recoiled. I said talk, not fuck. Jeez. You actin’ crazy.
Crazy? You’re calling me crazy?
Alright alright, let me rewind.
You know my worst fear is to become like my father!
I was watching myself from a faraway, amused place as I spoke. For weeks, I had felt I was no longer in my body. I was observing myself observing myself observing myself. It went on to a distracting degree. Everything struck me as both stupidly distant and hallucinatorily vivid. I was split between body and mind. My corporal half could writhe with any emotion, while my cerebral half observed with cynicism.
Well, Jean, I hate to break it to you: you are kinda like him.
His words shattered me, deliciously, and I drove back to my house in a teary delirium. My mother was drinking a glass of ice water in the kitchen. She stared at me with what I perceived as contempt. I grabbed a Tylenol bottle from the medicine cabinet. I stomped upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom, blaring the Emiliana Torrini song “To Be Free” on repeat at full volume. I stripped. First, I would slit my wrists. Then I would swallow a hundred Tylenol pills.
I sat in the bathtub and scratched at my left wrist with my Venus razor. It was hard to cut the skin. I pulled at the blades with my nails, blunting them. Still it was difficult to do deep damage. I rubbed the blade against my skin furiously, zigzagging, circling, carving mountains and canyons of meat. A thick stream of blood made satisfying swirls of gore in the tub. The concreteness of the pain anchored me. I leaned my head against the tile. I decided to postpone my suicide. The damage I had done relieved and relaxed me. I was suddenly sober enough to do an inventory of all of my banal and vain reasons not to die. I still had my horse. Riding was a reason to live. I was no longer getting straight A’s, but I was still making honor roll. My English teacher, Mr. Brown, was praising my nonfiction writing. I was writing investigative articles for his class, about Southeast San Diego gangs and the county’s allegedly haunted places, as well as essays about my father. I had finally broken my silence.
When my mother entered my room later, I was stanching the blood flow of my wrist
with a red towel. In the darkness, she held up the razor I had used to butcher myself. You should be careful about using rusty razors, she said. My mother was perceiving my dried blood as iron oxide. I remembered the Wizard’s First Rule.
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I took the trolley south to the border, entered Mexico on foot. I walked through the rotating metal gates at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in a miniskirt and tube top. The U.S. side was quiet, clean, deserted. On the Mexican side of the border, the streets were littered with trash and a mob of male taxistas surrounded me, their yellow cabs congregated at the crossing. Taxi! Taxi, señorita! Discount for the pretty lady! They competed angrily, with flirtation, flattery, discounts. I hopped into the nearest vehicle. ¿Dónde está la fiesta? I asked. I now spoke Spanish with an American accent, not quite opening my mouth enough on the vowels. He drove me straight to Calle Revolución. Tijuana had a fictional quality to it: flies drank from the eyes of donkeys painted as zebras; cloudy-eyed amputees consulted crumpled Tarot cards; the houses were all colors of the rainbow. The streets crumbled and curved into dramatic spirals. Every stimulus of nocturnal Mexico threatened to blot me out—the blasting mariachi, the consciousness-eliminating tequila, the sweaty bodies of drunk men in crowded clubs.
It felt liberating to dangle over the abyss in my father’s country. I crossed again and again, crashing house parties, crawling into random cars, accepting drinks from older men. I was sixteen and Mexico’s drinking age was eighteen, but nobody requested my identification. I woke up puking in strangers’ toilets. When my mother found my trolley ticket stubs, she was horrified—she had heard of rising homicides and kidnappings in Mexico. But she couldn’t stop me from going there. I was looking for my father. If I couldn’t find him, I would become him.
In San Diego, I got so many speeding tickets in my mother’s BMW that she made me use her minivan instead. I left a used condom in the back. When I realized my mistake, I had already returned the keys. I asked her for them with alcohol on my breath. She marched straight to the van. I stumbled after her. She threw open the doors and I lunged at the back seat, grasping in the dark. My hand found it as hers did. I pulled. She pulled harder. The condom snapped out of my hand, splashing semen into the air. My mother’s face glistened. She wiped her face with her wrist. I felt anesthetized, as if in a dream.
I knew it! she roared, thunder itself. I knew it! You’re a whore, a filthy puta! Her limbs were lightning. She tore at my clothes. She stripped me half naked on the driveway. She was trying to claw me back into her world. But I was untouchable now. All the things she said were true.
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My mother bought us plane tickets to Puerto Rico. She had never taken a vacation before, and wanted to reconnect with us. I ignored her for most of the trip. One rainy night as I walked on the beach, I met a tall olive-skinned boy with seaweed-green eyes, like mine. He was also on vacation—coincidentally, from San Diego. Jason was a juvenile delinquent. He had assaulted a classmate with a machete. We became a couple back home. I knew, by then, how to hold on to men like him. I repeatedly dumped Jason, then returned to him. I refused to have sex with him. Once, Jason stormed outside, stole a neighbor’s Ferrari and got thrown back into juvenile hall. From juvie, he wrote romantic letters filled with spelling errors. My mother opened them and threw them in the trash. But I knew where to search. Jason called me collect. I’m gonna escape from here one day, and we can run away to Mexico, he said.
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One evening, in the middle of a fight with my mother, I said: It’s all your fault! You turned me into this! Suddenly, she looked like a little girl as she begged, eyes red and wet: No, no, no…please, it can’t be true. I’m sorry…God, I’m so sorry. For a moment, I saw the woman from Paradise Hills, the one who had drawn faces on trees, who had laughed at the ladybugs, who had taught me the alchemy of interpretation—and I wanted so badly to be in her arms. But I was not like her anymore.
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My mother brought me the latest issue of a magazine called Equestrian Vacations. She asked me to choose a trip. She wanted to reward me for consistently making honor roll. I signed up for an intensive two-week equine-training program in Ireland at the world-renowned Clonshire Equestrian Centre: boot camp for young riders. We woke up at dawn, groomed and saddled our horses, then rode into the countryside, where we jumped over brick walls and haystacks. I rode Zeus, a bay stallion I had noticed in a corner stall. Nobody rides Zeus; he’s crazy, someone said, so I saddled him up. Zeus had thick hooves and nimble legs that could fly over jumps of any height and land without a sound. He had to be first in line, or else he bucked and reared. After morning lessons, everyone fought over scraps of cold lunch, then rode again until nightfall. In the rain, we galloped down muddy hills. Once, I made a mistake preparing Zeus for a descending line of jumps on a hill. I led the charge with seven or eight riders behind. He screeched to a halt. I fell into the slippery earth. I looked up and saw muddy hooves dripping black water against the backdrop of a purple sky. The sight was exhilarating.
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My mother feared an equine career would kill me. In four years, I had experienced several concussions inducing short-term amnesia and cracked a vertebra in my spine, which had paralyzed me from the waist down for a month. She argued for a literary path. But aspiring to author books felt too fanciful. I wanted to do something practical, be in the world, experiencing life, not locked up in my room imagining things like when I was a child. Mr. Brown convinced me to apply to a few journalism schools, in addition to the equine-studies universities that interested me. With four other students, I had helped him turn the school’s trashy quarterly into a glossy literary magazine that people throughout Bishop’s read. Mr. Brown gave me a copy of Mary Karr’s famous memoir, The Liars’ Club, about growing up with a binge-drinking father and an eccentric mother in eastern Texas. You aren’t doomed because of your father, he said. You can turn bad things into good things.
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One night, near the end of senior year, I awoke to Jason’s voice. He was downstairs in the living room with my mother, beside a fat Samoan with blank eyes, telling her he had just been admitted to Harvard. I had to come tell Jean right away. I’m turning my life around, thanks to her—she’s an inspiration.
My mother tousled his hair, then patted the Samoan’s shoulder.
I’ll go make you boys some tea, she said.
She vanished into the kitchen. Jason gestured at the Samoan, who unzipped his jacket and revealed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a plastic bag full of white powder and a plastic bag full of pills. I escaped from juvie, babe, Jason said. For you. I brought some pills. We can put one in your mom’s drink. She’ll pass out and won’t notice a thing!
I recoiled. Jason, you’re nuts, get out of my house.
Jason spread his arms wide. Are you serious, babe? I just, like, escaped from juvie for you, and this is how you greet me?
I dismissed his lamentations with a hand gesture.
I’ll visit you tomorrow after class. Where are you staying?
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The house was nestled between boulder-studded mountains on a Kumeyaay Indian reservation about forty minutes east of my school. I arrived at sunset. Jason emerged from the house with cloudy eyes, in a white wifebeater like the ones my father used to wear. He cast a long, reaching shadow. He seemed alien, even ugly. I immediately regretted coming, but I couldn’t think of an excuse to leave. I followed him inside, where shaved-headed, tattooed men sat on a mutilated leather couch, sharing a bong. One stuck a needle in his arm.
My mother was once again letting me use her BMW. Jason wanted to take the car on a drive. I refused. He tore the keys from my hands. I dove into the passenger’s seat. He sped through the reservation at 110, 120, 140 miles an hour. I yelled at h
im to stop. He kept speeding, flew over a flimsy bridge, into the mountains. I was sure he was going to crash. It was dark when he hit the brakes back in front of the house. Can we make love yet, babe? he asked, out of breath with exhilaration.
I’m not ready yet, I said, trying to hide my absolute lack of desire to ever have sex with him by planting a kiss on his lips.
He wrapped his arms around me, encouraged. But we’ve been together three months.
I shrugged him off. Um, that’s not true. We broke up a million times, remember?
Come on, babe, he said, grabbing my hand and pressing it against his crotch. I pulled away. I suspected Jason had sexually transmitted diseases.
He sighed. Fine, let’s go into the back seat and cuddle, at least.
He crawled into the back. I followed, wondering how soon I could leave without making him angry. Jason unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis, which struck me as grotesque in its elephantine size. I realized, then, that if Jason wanted to, he could rape me; he could call his friends and have them rape me, too; they could kill me and bury my body in the mountains.
Jason, I told you, I’m not ready.
Jason grabbed my face and kissed me aggressively. I retreated. What’s your problem? he asked. He grabbed my arm and yanked me closer. He stuck his tongue down my throat, twisted his body, pinned mine down. Jason, I said no. I didn’t want to scream. I didn’t want to piss him off. I was afraid to lure his friends. I lay there saying no and no as nicely as possible. He pushed my underwear aside as I tried to dissuade him in polite whispers. He pushed himself into me. He thrust: once, twice. When he saw tears on my face, he froze. Okay, okay.
He pulled out, sat up and zipped up his pants. Fine, babe, fine. He smoothed his hair, looking stressed. You know I’m willing to wait as long as it takes. I love you, babe.